The report does highlight language as one of the great barriers towards increased public participation. I would actually go further and challenge that it is simply impossible for a non-English speaker to hold any sort of an active role within ICANN.

In my mind, the report also brings to the fore one of ICANN's basic dichotomies: it tries to be both as bottom-up and open as it can, and an effective governance body at the same time.

ICANN would like to include as many participants as possible in its processes and laments the fact that the volunteers it relies on to function are long-time ICANN attendees. "It is still common for everyone deciding an issue of global import to know one another on first-name terms," says Kieren in his report.

While this is very true, I also see it as a by-product of ICANN's over reliance on volunteers. I don't know of many governance bodies in charge of a global resource that rely so much on unpaid volunteer goodwill. For ICANN, the result is that the only people who can afford the time and personal commitment that ICANN involvement calls for, either have a vested interest in doing so (i.e. they are part of the domain name industry), or care so much about the issues being discussed that they are ready to selflessly donate of themselves to them. That second category of people is probably very rare…

So until ICANN can solve the volunteer conundrum – how to maintain a volunteer based model and its obvious advantages in terms of expertise and diversity while keeping the organisation accessible to non-insiders – I don't see how the situation described above can change. And I have to admit I have no clever ideas on how to remedy this problem. Maybe one of you reading this post can participate and volunteer one..?